My son may never see a polar bear in the wild. Among the great
tragedies of the world, this is perhaps a minor issue, but it means two things.
First, we’ll experience significant change in our planet’s ecosystems within
this lifetime – it’s already happening. Second, we haven’t protected the earth
for the next generation. In fact, we’ve done a fine job of screwing it up.
I have this dream of my family on the rocky shoreline of
Ellesmere Island. My husband stands on one side of Kieran and I stand on the
other. With the tiny community of Grise Fiord behind us, we look out over the
bay and tell him our story, the story of how we met.
The High Arctic is the place where both my husband and I held
our first teaching jobs. It is the place where we met and fell in love. It is
also an ecosystem profoundly in danger thanks to consumer excess and industrial
pollution.
In this Inuit hamlet of one hundred and fifty people, my
students cheered for me when I jumped a crack in the sea ice on my Ski-Doo. As a
new teacher, I didn’t think it unusual when I supervised school field trips
where I was the only unarmed person. Students who were oppositional in the
classroom offered me tea and bannock on the land, asking if I felt warm enough.
They are at home out on the sea ice, an environment many would find intolerable.
Will Kieran, like me, gaze up at the eternal sky, as he lays on
a sled pulled by a dog team? Will he taste the fresh warmth of seal meat? Will
he drink the pure water from a glacial lake? Will he stand at the foot of an
iceberg and marvel at its sculpture? Will he smell the ice on his hair, on his
skin, after he comes home from a day on the land?
Likely, by the time he reaches his eighteenth birthday, there
will be no sea ice left. As the ice melts, the plankton disappears – and the
chain shatters. The cod eat the plankton, the seal eat the cod, and the polar
bears eat the seal. Without the ice, they all disappear. And the Inuit culture,
a culture that has thrived for millennia in one of the earth’s most inhospitable
places, will be irrevocably transformed.
Now, instead of standing on that Arctic beach, telling Kieran about
our connection to the clean silence of that land, we’ll have to tell him we’re
sorry. We’re sorry that we let it get to this point. We’re sorry that we let
such beauty be destroyed in our pursuit of stuff.
Many of the current residents of Grise Fiord are descendants of
a forced relocation by the Canadian government in 1953. Eight families were
taken from Northern Quebec and dropped on the shores of Ellesmere Island to
secure sovereignty over the High Arctic. Those families spent their first winter
in canvas tents on the beach, watching their children freeze and starve. But
they learned the migration routes of the animals in that new place and they
survived. It is their relationship with the world around them – the land, the
ocean, and the animals – that has allowed them to endure. They manage their
environment with passionate resolve. Now, problems outside their control
threaten to destroy it.
In the Arctic, just a thirty-minute Ski-Doo ride from Grise
Fiord, I explored a thousand-year-old polar bear trap. Because things don’t
break down in that desert climate, it’s also the place where I saw the dramatic
effects of toxic chemicals on a fragile ecosystem. Core samples of the nearby
glacier proved to be a historical timeline for our violent twentieth century,
revealing the fallout from Hiroshima and then Chernobyl. One visiting scientist
explained the high levels of common household chemicals that his team found in
polar bear studies.
Now, instead of standing on that Arctic beach, telling Kieran
about our connection to the clean silence of that land, we’ll have to tell him
we’re sorry. We’re sorry that we let it get to this point. We’re sorry that we
let such beauty be destroyed in our pursuit of stuff. And this is a pursuit in
which we, his parents, have partaken. We’re trying, but we need to do more.
I hope I don’t have to make this apology. I hope Kieran’s experience of this
amazing place is more tactile than a few faded photographs. I hope we don’t fail
the Inuit, the wildlife, the children.
Perhaps one day my husband and I can tell our son another story,
a story about how the world pulled together to save the planet. We’ve rallied
incredible resources and masses of humanity to fight wars against each other. In
our story, we rally incredible resources and masses of humanity to save
ourselves, to save the land over which we once fought. It’s more than just the
polar bears at stake.
Andrea Cameron is a mother and educator living in
Eastern Ontario. She writes a weekly column for The Brockville Voice. Her poetry
and fiction has appeared in Room Magazine and The Antigonish Review. You can
read her blog at andreacameron.blogspot.com. She has also written articles for
previous issues of Natural Life Magazine.
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